Metadata in general be may defined as ‘data that provides information about one or more other aspects of data. These other aspects may comprise anything, such as an indication of the type or nature of the data, purpose of the data, time and date of creation, creator or author of data, placement/location on a network where the data was created/persisted/available or any other information that provides more detail to and about the actual data. Data may be stored in a number of different formats: structured flat files such as Comma, tab, etc. delimited, XML files, Data Cubes or Summary/Aggregated Datasets, Sampled Datasets, or Relational Databases, etc. searching.
If all data sources followed a standardized data structure and metadata definitions they can be seamlessly searched. Since standardizing data structures of different data sources is not practical, this application proposes a method of standardizing the metadata of any structured data source and storing into a common metadata repository and finally federating user query via this repository to data sources that can answers the query based on the level of match.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a method and apparatus that overcomes these noted drawbacks of the prior art and allows for extraction of additional useful metadata from databases and datasets, and also provide rich metadata from file based datasets.